THE PHRASE “FAKE
NEWS”has exploded in usage since the election, but the term is similar to
other malleable political labels such as “terrorism” and “hate speech”; because
the phrase lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as
an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize
about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically
those most aggressively disseminating it.

One of the most egregious examples was the
recent Washington Post article hyping a new anonymous group and itsdisgusting blacklistof supposedly pro-Russia news
outlets – ashameful article mindlessly spreadby countless journalists who love to
decry Fake News, despite the Post article itself being centrally based on
Fake News. (The Post this weekfinally added a lame editor’s noteacknowledging these critiques; the
Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean to “vouch for the
validity” of the blacklist even though the article’s key claims were based
on doing exactly that).

That the emails in the Wikileaks archive
were doctored or faked – and thus should be disregarded – was classic Fake
News, spread not by Macedonian teenagers or Kremlin operatives but by
established news outlets such as MSNBC, the Atlantic and Newsweek. And, by
design, this Fake News spread like wildfire all over the internet,
hungrily clicked and shared by tens of thousands of people eager to
believe it was true. As a result of this deliberate disinformation campaign,
anyone reporting on the contents of the emails was instantly met with claims
that the documents in the archive had been proven fake.

The most damaging such claim came from
MSNBC’s intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance. As Idocumented on October 11, he tweeted what he –
for some bizarre reason – labeled an “Official Warning.” It decreed: “#PodestaEmailsare already proving to be riddled with
obvious forgeries &#blackpropagandanot even professionally done.” That
tweet was re-tweeted by more than 4,000 people. It was vested with added credibility
by Clinton-supporting journalists like ReidandFrum (“expert to take seriously”).

All of that, in turn, led toan article in something called “The Daily News Bin”with the headline: “MSNBC intelligence
expert: WikiLeaks is releasing falsified emails not really from Hillary
Clinton.” This classic fake news product – citing Nance and Reid among others –
was shared more than 40,000 times on Facebook alone.

FROM THE START,it was
obvious that it wasthis accusationfrom Clinton supporters – not the
WikiLeaks documents – that was a complete fraud, perpetrated on the public as
deliberate disinformation. With regard to the claim about the Podesta emails,
now we know exactly who created it in the first instance: a hard-core Clinton
fanatic.

When Nance – MSNBC’s “intelligence analyst”
– issued his “Official Warning,” he linked toa tweet that warned: “Please be skeptical
of alleged#PodestaEmails. Trumpists are dirtying docs.” That
tweet, in turn, linked to a tweet from an anonymous account calling itself “The
Omnivore,” which hadposted an obviously fake transcriptpurporting to be a Hillary Clinton
speech to Goldman Sachs. Even though that fake document was never published by
WikiLeaks, that was the entire basis for the MSNBC-inspired claim that some of
the WikiLeaks documents were doctored.

But the person who created that forged
Goldman Sachs transcript was not a “Trumpist” at all; he was a devoted
supporter of Hillary Clinton. In the Daily Beast, the person behind the
anonymous “The Omnivore” accountunmasks himself as “Marco Chacon,”a self-professed creator of
“viral fake news” whose targets were Sanders and Trump supporters (he
specialized in blatantly fake anti-Clinton frauds with the goal of
tricking her opponents into citing them, so that they would be discredited).
When he wasn’t posting fabricated news accounts designed to make Clintons’
opponents look bad, his account looked like any other standard pro-Clinton
account: numerous negative items about Sanders and then Trump, with links to
many Clinton-defending articles.

In his Daily Beast article, published on
November 21, Chacon describes how he manufactured the forged Goldman Sachs
speech transcript. He says he did it prior to learning that the WikiLeaks
releases of Podesta emails contained actual Clinton speech excerpts to Wall
Street banks. But once he realized WikiLeaks had published actual Clinton
transcripts, Chacon began trying to lure people he disliked – Clinton
critics – into believing that his forged speeches were real, so that he could
prove they were gullible and dumb.

Sadly for Chacon, however, the people who
ended up getting fooled by his Fake News items were the nation’s most prominent
Clinton supporters, including supposed experts and journalists from MSNBC who
used his obvious fakes to try to convince the world that the WikiLeaks archive
had been compromised and thus should be ignored. That it was pro-Clinton
journalists who spread his Fake News as real now horrifies even Chacon:

The tweet went super-viral. It started an
almost trending—but still going today—hashtag #bucketoflosers. A tweet
declaring it a bad forgery was picked up by Malcolm Nance, an intelligence
analyst for MSNBC among others, who tweeted to be wary of the WikiLeaks
release. . .

That did not stop Nance, who with a firm
intelligence background should have been able to easily spot the fake with
“(chaos)” actually written in the side bar and “((makes air quotes))” written
before the “bucket of losers” piece in the completely comical so-called
transcript, from referencing the document and saying: “Official Warning:
#PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries &
#blackpropaganda not even professionally done” . . . .

At the end of the day, did this change
anything? I don’t know. I think I inadvertently hurt WikiLeaks, which I’m not
proud of—but I’m not too sorry about either. I suspect that some people came to
realize that they were believing in fake things.

That last sentence – that as a result of his
fraud, “some people came to realize that they were believing in fake things” –
is false, at least insofar as it applies to people like Eichenwald, Frum, Nance
and Reid. Even though it was clear from the start to any rational and honest
person that there was zero evidence that any of the WikiLeaks documents were
doctored, and even though (as Chacon himself says) nobody minimally informed
(let alone supposed “intelligence experts”) should have been fooled by his
blatant Fake News, none of the journalists who lied to the public about these
WikiLeaks documents have even once acknowledged what they did.

Their Fake News tweets – warning people to
view the WikiLeaks documents as fake – remain posted, with no subsequent
retraction or acknowledgment of the falsehoods that they spread about the
WikiLeaks archive. That includes MSNBC segments which spread this accusation.

Indeed, not only should it have been
blatantly obvious that Chacon’s anonymously posted document did not impugn
the WikiLeaks archive, but also the slightest research would have revealed that
the person who manufactured the forgery wasa Clinton supporter, not a
“Trumpist” or a Kremlin operative. Indeed, one of the Clinton-criticizing
journalists who Chacon tried to trick, Michael Tracey,said exactly this at the time. But
because his facts contradicted the MSNBC/Newsweek political agenda, they were
ignored in favor of the lie that the WikiLeaks archive had been compromised and
doctored:

I will be shocked if any of them now
acknowledge this even with Chacon’s confession. That’s because MSNBC has
repeatedly proven that it tolerates Fake News and outright lies from its
personalities as long as those lies are in service of the right candidate (when
Democrats weresmearing Jill Stein as a Kremlin stooge,
Reid’s program aired Nance’s lie to MSNBC viewers that Stein had previously
hosted her own show on RT: an utter fabrication that MSNBC, to this day,
has never corrected or even acknowledged despitemultiple requestsfromFAIR).

Every day, literally, you can turn on MSNBC
and hear various people so righteously lamenting the spread of “Fake News.” Yet
MSNBC itself not only spreads Fake News but refuses to correct it when it is
exposed. How do they have any credibility to denounce Fake News? They do not.

That journalists and “experts” outright
lied to the public this way in order to help their favorite candidate is
obviously dangerous. This was most powerfully pointed out – ironically – by
Marty Baron, Executive Editor of the Washington Post, whotold The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg: “If
you have a society where people can’t agree on basic facts, how do you have a
functioning democracy?”

Exactly: if you have prominent journalists
telling the public to trust an anonymous group with a false McCarthyite
blacklist, or telling it to ignore informative documents on the grounds that
they are fake when there is zero reason to believe that they are fake, that is
a direct threat to democracy. In the case of the Podesta emails, these lies
were perpetrated by the very factions that have taken to most loudly
victimizing themselves over the spread of Fake News.

But the problem here goes way beyond mere
hypocrisy. Complaints about Fake News are typically accompanied by calls for
“solutions” that involve censorship and suppression, either by the government
or tech giants such as Facebook. But until there is a clear definition of “Fake
News,” and until it’s recognized that Fake News is being aggressively
spread by the very people most loudly complaining about it, the dangers posed
by these solutions will be at least as great as the problem itself.

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